Irving Penn
A report with imitated photos by Jessica Iekel-Johnson
Born on June 16th, 1917, Irving Penn went to Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art in 1934. Penn worked as an assistant with Alexey Brodovitch for the magazine Harper's Bazaar. Originally planning on being a painter, he went to Mexico to paint, traveling through South America, and taking photos along the way. A couple years later, he took his first job for Vogue in 1943 designing photographic covers, meeting Swedish model Lisa Fonssagrives, on a trip to Paris, marrying her in 1950. In the 1960s when magazine budgets were strained Penn became unsatisfied with his work in the magazines and began experimenting with photography methods from the 1800s, closing his studio in Manhattan and working in a lab in Long Island and created three big series: Cigarettes, Street Material, and Archaeology. He reopened a studio in Manhattan and picked up drawing and painting as a hobby, as well as continually having photography land in Vogue, until his death on October 7th, 2009.
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A photograph of Penn titled Irving Penn: In a Cracked Mirror taken in 1986
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I have a key hole that's shaped like the one in the image is on a door, so when you look through it it's tiny on the other side because you're looking through a hole in a 2 inch door. This means that the actual eye is smaller, but I decided not to crop it much because you can see the faint glow of the outline on the outside of the door which I like. I only had my dad to use for the eye so the eye in my photo isn't as blue because my family has more gray-ish blue eyes.
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I knew I wanted to use this photo when I saw it because at my house we have the same bones for my dog, so I borrowed them from her and balanced them against my wall. I wasn't able to stack them as high as the original picture because the ones we have don't have many flat tops so they don't balance well. I struggled with the reflection but ended up just flipping the image and turning down the opacity because I wasn't able to figure out how to do the lined up reflection.
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This one is the one with the most differences in my mind. I didn't have a glove with the visible stitching like the one in Penn's photo, so I had to make do with the black glove. I used pipe cleaner because we don't have twine and I filled it with beads because I have a bunch of art supplies in my room. When editing the photo I was experimenting with the background and I got this cool boarder effect that I liked so I kept it.
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